A woman who underwent a double mastectomy while living as a trans man is now planning to undergo surgery to get her breasts back.
Alia Ismail, now 28, came out as a transgender man when she was 18 and began a medical transition that required her to take hormones and have her breasts removed at the age of 20.
But in February 2021, Alia, a hairdresser from Detroit, Michigan, decided to make the transition after realizing that her new identity as a trans man did not represent who she was.
“Now, at 28, I finally feel like a woman,” she said. “I feel so empowered by the struggles I’ve faced as a woman. Being a woman is hard and you have to be resilient and strong. I am strong.’
“The best advice I can give about transitioning is to really listen to yourself and follow your intuition, heart, and gut feeling,” said Alia, pictured after quitting testosterone.
Reflecting on why she chose to transition, Alia, who suffered major trauma as a young woman, said, “I thought it was better to be a man. I felt safe for a while. I no longer had to worry about other men tormenting me so much.”
The 28-year-old shared her advice for anyone considering gender confirmation surgery such as a double mastectomy.
She said: ‘Looking back, I wish I had waited longer to have the surgery, but then I felt comfortable in my body.
“I would advise anyone considering this to remind themselves that it’s okay to not be so rigid and embrace the stereotypes about what it means to have a certain gender identity and how to express yourself.”
‘I switched over ten years ago and it was not clear to me at the time that gender could be made more fluid.’
After transitioning, Alia said she “began to feel more uncomfortable without breasts.”
‘It was just a series of moments where I got frustrated because I couldn’t wear certain clothes and just didn’t like the way my body looked. The procedure is about achieving my original shape in my body.”
Her first step on her detransition journey was to stop taking testosterone. She made the choice to live as a woman without breasts, but two years later she decided to undergo a fat graft to create breasts after becoming ‘frustrated’ with her body.
A 2022 study found that the number of gender reassignment surgeries performed on American children has increased thirteenfold over the past decade.
The researchers, from a large healthcare system in California, found that children as young as 12 were offered irreversible surgeries between 2013 and 2020.
As gender-affirming care becomes more popular among children, more and more patients are coming forward to regret the irreversible procedure, claiming they weren’t challenged enough as children.
